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Daily Blah for... Thursday, June 30, 2005
Time For A Change
We interrupt this blog for an important announcement. Great changes are afoot. Starting August 1, I shall be leaving my post at Time after five-and-a-bit glorious years as the San Francisco correspondent. It was a great gig, but the next one is even better: Futures editor at Business 2.0, the magazine of the savvy entrepreneur. Futures editor? Yes, I shall be crafting, assigning and occasionally writing Wired-style stories with long-term vision (biotech, nanotech, quantum computers and space entrepreuneurs, oh my!) In other words, the kind of borderline sci-fi stuff I've been passionate about my whole life.
No longer shall I be working at home, but downtown, way up in the sky in the splendid One California building. That's okay. A home office is all very well, but after half a decade you start to miss the buzz of the watercooler and the concept of home as a sanctuary from work (rather than a familiar and comfortable office in which you happen to be taking a break).
Also on August 1, I must move to a new apartment, location as yet unknown. I'm casting a wide net, from Mill Valley to Berkeley to Glen Park, and have no doubt I'll find something splendid via the universal rental locator known as Craigslist. The only problem, as the eagle-eyed among you will have spotted, is that moving day and new job day are one and the same. Thus August 1 will, I imagine, be what the American tongue so aptly terms a bitch.
And now back to your regularly scheduled Blah.
Daily Blah for... Monday, June 27, 2005
Stop the World
Not a good news day if you're a journalist, a P2P file downloader or someone with an allergic reaction to intensely radioactive plutonium in your water. The Supremes not only slammed Grokster with a decision that betrays an inexcusable technical ignorance, they also refused to hear the First Amendment arguments of Matthew Cooper (of Time) and Judith Miller (of the NYT) -- fine and principled reporters who are under threat of jail for not naming their sources. I have nothing remotely humorous to say about any of this idiocy ... then you read that the US has suddenly decided to manufacture the world's most deadly (and leaky) plutonium fuel again, citing no other reason than "national security", and the most plausible explanation in the article is that it's for little plutonium spy devices polluting our waterways, and it makes you want to go live in a shack in Idaho, except Idaho is exactly where it's being manufactured ... I'd say there's at least one NASA administrator doing his level best to get us off this toxic dump of a planet, except that apparently the agency can't even figure out how to deal with that worthy travel foe, ice. Ever heard of antifreeze? Stop the world, we're too dumb to get off.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Moon Maker
The new documentary Gaia Selene promises to do for space exploration -- specifically, populating the moon -- what What the Bleep Do We Know did for quantum metaphysics: a wee bit light on the fact-checking, heavy on the inspiring vision. Call me a wide-eyed idealist, but I'd rather have it err on that side than the other. Movies are for visualization, and we're desperately thirsty for insipiring visions these days. You want each fact sourced, dissected and meticulously countered with its opposing argument, go read the New Yorker. Gaia Selene has its basic facts straight: we need to get people off the planet pronto before we (or some big nasty space rock) break the thing, and starting a lunar economy of helium-3 mining and low-gravity tourism is as good a beginning as any.
Jobs Gets Heavy
That commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford a couple weeks ago is now available online as an MP3. And it's a doozy: personal, profound, uplifting and unflinching thoughts on death, dropping out and getting the sack. Some of my favorite bits:
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life ...
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, June 18, 2005
Million-dollar Ideas: ParKarma™
A semi-regular series of "Hey! Wouldn't it be great if someone made a business out of ..." concepts.
2. ParKarma™
This one has to wait for the widespread implementation of GPS (Global Positioning System) in cellphones. It also won't be much good until you have a critical mass of subscribers in any given area -- say 1 for every 50 people in the neighborhood. It might also work only in car-heavy, pedestrian-heavy cities like London, New York or San Francisco. That given, ParKarma™ is a 100% free subscriber service in which subscribers sign up for text alerts about another kind of GPS (Good Parking Spots), also known as "rockstar parking," near their present location. ParKarma™ knows where a lot of GPS currently are, ParKarma™ knows where you are, and ParKarma™ knows the exact length of your car. The upshot being that whenever you drive along a car-sandwiched street in anxious pursuit of parking, your phone will be able and willing to offer directions to a free spot somewhere near you.
How does ParKarma™ get this knowledge? From its subscribers, of course. We're all wired to notice GPS on crowded streets even when we're not in our cars. (One thing the human brain is really good at -- solving problems, especially spatial problems, long after they've ceased to be problems). You know you're a true San Franciscan when, the saying goes, you cry at the sight of GPS (tears of joy if you're right next to it in your car, tears of rage if someone else just took it, and tears of melancholy if you decided to walk tonight). All a ParKarma™ subscriber has to do to mollify that last emotional moment, to make some use of it, is to press the ParKarma™ button on his cellphone twice -- once at each end of the spot. So ParKarma™ knows how long it is, the time of discovery, and where its nearest subscribers are.
Okay, but what incentive would anyone really have for such a selfless deed? Simple: the more GPS you spot, the more ParKarma™ works for you in return. Everyone has a vested interest in maintaining the system, and their status within it. You wouldn't want your ParKarma™ Points to run out when you most need them -- that horrible sweaty moment on a Saturday night when all that's standing between you and a perfect, on-time date downtown is lack of GPS. So you spot. Since ParKarma™ Points can also be converted back into cash, you could even spend a profitable evening prowling the streets with friends, hunting GPS. It's as good a reason as any to get some fresh air.
How would ParKarma™ Corporation make bread, greenbacks, spondulicks? For one thing, parking garages would kill to get on the system. A lot of garages these days know are set up to know exactly how many spots they have on each floor at any given moment. An empty spot is lost money (and higher prices for us). ParKarma™ could become the lifeblood of the garages, and bring prices down. For another thing, advertisers would love to have their brand names associated with such a service, since consumers would develop a Pavlovian sense of relief when they use it.
Indeed, ParKarma™ is the kind of basic subsystem you could build all sorts of Citysearch and Good Food Guide information on top of. Imagine local restaurants congratulating you on your rockstar parking, and pointing out to the nearest place you and your equally relieved date can go celebrate with a slap-up meal of burger, fries and milkshake. Click here for directions -- only a few extra ParKarma™ Points.
Million-dollar Ideas: The Love Wiki
A semi-regular series of "my God! Wouldn't it be great if someone made a business out of ..." concepts.
1. The Marriage Counselling Wiki
So you and your beloved are at each other's throats again. Instead of wasting hours in therapy, why not build a Wiki together? A Wiki, that is, about your marriage. Its past, its present state and its purpose. Then -- and this is the useful bit -- argue the hell out of it.
This would be an easy transiton, as the natural early stage of any Wiki's development exactly resembles a marital dispute. There's a lot of "but you said ..." followed by "that's absolute crap, what I really said was" and "no, you idiot, that's not what you said" -- just automated.
Initially, nothing constructive would be built. For days, weeks or even--if it is a particularly divisive situation--months, what would follow would be deletion after counter-deletion from the troubled couple.
Then, ever so slowly, sentences that spouses actually agree on would start to pop out of the ether. It could start with something as simple as which day they first met and which movie they first saw together. And when sentences start to meet, clinging to each other for support, they give birth to paragraphs. Paragraphs lead ineluctably to more paragraphs. The truth of things, the neutral third-party view, begins to evolve with growing confidence. (Best of all, No family member or friend need get deputized as a supposedly neutral third party).
Where agreement cannot be found, wary truces are declared, as there's always room in a Wiki to explain exactly what the dispute is and where both sides stand on the topic. Then, finally, the day comes when the Wiki web site is released to the public.
So where's the business opportunity? Well, there's always a need for tech support for the less web-savvy. Writing support for the less, er, able to write. And emotional support from Wiki veterans, who would be on hand to assure that it's really okay to say that -- and to delete anything and everything you want.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, June 15, 2005
An Open Letter to Dianne Feinstein
Dear Senator Feinstein,
A flag-burning amendment may be about to pass? And you, a California Democrat, are co-sponsoring it?
You've got to be kidding me. Please, tell me a better joke, because I could do with a good punchline, and this one is lousy.
Couldn't you find something better to do with your time than stomping on free speech in a flagrant play for Central Valley votes? What's the matter, is universal healthcare too tough a topic? Iraq too thorny an issue? The environment too difficult a thing to save?
There was one flag burning incident in America last year. ONE. You don't use a machine-gun to swat a fly. This issue is not worthy of you, nor is it worth desecrating the Constitution for. Not only would this amendment make a mockery of the First, it will turn America into the laughing stock of the world. As an immigrant, I should know.
Rest assured, if you continue to support it and it passes, your liberal base in San Francisco will not forget. They will fight your reelection tooth and nail. They will support any other Democrat and go door-to-door across the state for them. Don't underestimate their influence, passion or ability to remember your guiding role in this idiotic amendment. The Republicans know only too well how important it is to play to their base. It's high time you learned how to play to yours.
Here's hoping you and those four other Democrats come to your senses in the next few days. Goodness knows, it would be about time.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, June 14, 2005
But Do You Get More Birthday Presents?
Tell the truth -- you needed just one more reason why smoking and being obese are bad news, didn't you? Try this on for size (or stick it in your pipe, etc.): they make you biologically older. Literally. I'm not making this up. It's all to do with telomeres, the fuse on the ends of our chromosones that tells cells when to start dying. Smoke a pack a day and your DNA is about five years older than the number on your birthday cards. Get porky, and you add an astonishing nine circuits of the sun. It's like time travel, only much less fun and utterly irreversible.
On the other hand, the study found that booze has the opposite effect, lengthening our telomeres and turning us into bronzed Adonises and Venuses. The only problem, researchers laughed while swigging down pints of Jim Bean, is that you might end up looking too young and not get served in bars.
Okay, I did make that bit up.
Daily Blah for... Monday, June 13, 2005
Steve Jobs' Recipe for Success
1. Drop out of college.
2. Drop back into college. Take class on caligraphy.
3. Survive on hand-outs from Hare Krishnas.
4. Drop acid. Create insanely great computers. Become billionaire.
5. Thirty years later, give speech to Stanford graduates explaining the whole thing.
Alan Moore Knows The Score
Mere nanometers below Douglas Adams in my all-time role-models list -- no, really, I do keep a list -- is the mighty Alan Moore, author of Watchmen (my single all-time favorite wood pulp product) as well as the recent Promethea series (which you really ought to pick up if you have even the slightest bit of interest in such esoteric things as the imagination, superheroines, the Tarot, the Kaballah, and life itself).
Like Adams and just about everyone else with a brain, Moore has had his share of issues with Hollywood. He detested the Sean Connery adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen -- didn't we all? -- and has publically distanced himself from the soon-to-be-screened V for Vendetta. I don't care too much about either of those, but am sure I'll soon be rending my garments over the Watchmen movie and whether another one of my childhood icons is about to be stomped on.
In the meantime, there's a documentary called Mindscape, starring Alan Moore himself. Here's the trailer. Moore is a famous recluse, and I was rather surprised to discover he'd not only consented to be filmed but agreed to lead the audience on a shamanic exploration of the nature of information. And now I know the reason he's been hiding away all these years -- that thick West Midlands accent.
People Who Visited Mars Also Visited ...
Blue Origin, the space tourism company founded by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, has at last started to release details about its mysterious rocket plans. It's to hurl paying passengers into sub-orbit with the help of a reusable liquid fuel rocket. The liquid fuel, by the way, is a composite of kerosene and hydrogen peroxide -- which may sound funny, bringing to mind as it does the image of an air-headed non-natural blonde burning her folicles on a gas lamp, but it's not a patch on SpaceShipOne's highly amusing combination of rubber and laughing gas. Whether the "Bezos booster," as it is being known, will also by powered by Jeff's trademark booming laugh could not be confirmed at press time.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, June 09, 2005
The Early Bird
Time to toot my own horn again: Daily Blah is the top Google search result for "Deep Throat and Adidam." My post was picked up in dozens of blogs and got a nice little mention on Cult News Network. Now for the obligatory self-effacing comment: anyone could have dug up this information on Google in the hours after the news broke. For three hours Joan Felt's name was there on the Adidam website, and the snarky comments were also in the clear. This job is all about worm-catching. Anyone can catch worms if they get up early enough.
DNA and I
I don't know if it's some kind of delayed reaction to seeing the movie. Maybe it's a kind of self-reinforcing behavioral feedback loops based on one of my oldest influences -- once started, it just blows up. Whatever the reason, I find myself this week in the midst of a full-on Douglas Adams/Hitchhiker's kick. It feels like a form of madness. I'm hungrily devouring every last piece of Adams' work I hadn't yet finished (the last few chapters of Mostly Harmless and Last Chance to See, as well as the "Salmon of Doubt" section of, er, Salmon of Doubt). I'm trawling through the MP3s of the radio series, looking for the bits from the Guide itself, then editing them together in a brand new MP3, which I will then burn on CDs and foist upon all my friends. And I also dug up, un more temps, the one interview I was lucky enough to do with DNA himself, a year before his death.
I think I mentioned this before, many, many Blahs ago, back at the beginning (I started this blog right around the time of his untimely death). I think I promised to post the interview, then promptly forgot to do so. Regardless, it was the one interview I've ever done that I transcribed it in full -- every word, every "erm" -- as if it were, say, a radio script. That wasn't required; the final Q&A on the People page was roughly the size of a peanut. But something must have told me this was a special, never-to-be-repeated occasion. How I wish I hadn't been right.
So here it is, in all its unexpurgated glory -- a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a timeless genius, and into the well-honed interviewing style of his interlocutor, which pretty much boils down to "just say anything that comes into your head."
To set the scene: it's early 2000. The dotcom bubble has not yet burst. The hottest handheld gadget is the Palm VII, Palm's first wireless network device. Douglas is working on his website, H2G2.com -- a sort of early Wikipedia -- and has just announced he will be creating a handheld version of the Guide. (Whatever happened to that plan after his death, I have no idea). Oh yes, and I'd only just found the message telling me what his phone number was, an hour after I was apparently supposed to call him.
CDT: Hi, Douglas Adams?
DNA: Speaking?
CDT: Chris Taylor, Time Magazine.
DNA: Oh, hello, hi, how are you.
CDT: Hello. Yes, I understand you were expecting a call from me.
DNA: Yes, that's right. I was kind of expecting it an hour ago and I was just wondering if something had gone wrong.
CDT: Yeah, I was expecting a call from you. I just presumed that —
DNA: Oh, oh I'm sorry about that, I—
CDT: No, that's okay—
DNA: —I didn't even have a number to call you on, actually.
CDT: Right, yes, I—well, ditto. So I guess that—I was trying to get in touch with Sophie [his assistant], and er—
DNA: Right. I think that Sophie's not well today. Oh, well, we've got it sorted out now.
CDT: Okay. We got there in the end. Er, so anyway, so I guess we, er, need to talk about, er, the new products—
DNA: Right.
CDT: The, er, website—
DNA: Yup.
CDT: The handheld device, and, er, the screenplay. I don't know if you're, ah—
DNA: Yes, all—we can talk about all those things.
CDT: Okay. Um, so you're in Santa Barbara right now?
DNA: That’s right, yup.
CDT: And you've been— is this a house thing you have there, or—
DNA: Er, yes, we're renting a house, with a view that, er, assuming this year goes well, you know, not only for me but for my family living here, then you know, we'll look to buy, and, you know, sort of settle.
CDT: Hmm. No, I just remember that you mention Santa Barbara in the fourth part of the trilogy.
DNA: Yes. Oddly enough, that was about the first time I went up to Santa Barbara. We lived in Los Angeles in 1983, and after just a few months kind of ran screaming. But had just noticed, just before we ran screaming, that Santa Barbara seemed a nice place. And since my life seems to consist of commuting across the Atlantic, which I was trying to, wanted to cut down on, erm— it's funny this thing about air miles? We're becoming aware of, actually discover what the function of air miles are. It's a video game score.
CDT: [laughs] Yes, whoever collects the most wins.
DNA: Yeah, yeah. But I really wanted to sort of cut down on that, and since— basically, what it seemed to me was that, erm, my work tended to divide into stuff I could do
anywhere and stuff that required me to be somewhere, and anything that required me to be somewhere required me to be in America, mostly on the West coast.
CDT: Right.
DNA: So—
CDT: So what can you tell us about the screenplay?
DNA: The screenplay is, erm, well, we hope it's gonna be, um, er, I mean, I've done God knows how many drafts, and I'm working on another one at the moment. But er, we have another writer currently working on my draft to, they hope, fix the structure. I mean, the structure of the thing has always been the problem. When it started out, you know, it was, erm, you know, I was writing it for radio and it was just kind of one damn thing after another—anything I could think of to fill up next week's episode kind of thing. And, so, erm, so, it's been a question of trying to discover what the wood is amongst all the trees.
CDT: Right, it's been an evolving story line, right from the radio series—
DNA: Oh, yes, well, it always have been, I mean every version I've done of it for different media has been quite a radically different storyline, because you think of a better way of doing it, or the medium makes certain things—the next medium you move it into makes certain things impossible or other things possible, so you rejig them.
CDT: Do you get to the stage where you feel you have to change it for the next—
DNA: Hmmmm — I guess so. I mean, the thing is, I left it alone for many many years, and coming back to it, it was actually— there were fresh things that occurred to me, fresh ideas that came along. And quite a lot of them are sparked by the fact that you're going to be able to see something on a big screen instead of just listening to it. And—
CDT: We are talking about the equivalent of the first book?
DNA: Yeah, I mean what I've always said about it is, yes, it's the first book, but more specifically what I'd say is it's the first book that it specifically contradicts.
CDT: [laughs] Can you tell us what contradictions there are at this stage, or is it just—
DNA: Oh, well, it's just the characters' motivations. There are lots of new scenes in it, and quite a few things that go. Inevitably, the new scenes in it are the ones I'm particularly fond of. But you know, the reason why everyone's doing what they're doing is the thing that always changes. So they may be doing the same things for different reasons.
CDT: I always thought it was a great example of the many universes theory.
DNA: Yes, yes, it's a sort of homage to David Deutsch.
CDT: Is it being Americanized, going through the Disney wringer?
DNA: Well, the thing is, it's an odd thing, although the Americans have always felt it was quintessentially English, a lot of people in England thought it was American. So, I hope it'll be, the end product will be reasonably international; the casting will almost certainly be a mixture of British and American actors, and I think that's fine.
CDT: I guess the real question is, have you been Americanized?
DNA: No, I don't think so. It's funny that my five-year-old daughter started attending school here, has been at school for a few weeks, and she has a very, very English accent, but any new words she learns, she learns them in an American accent. So she came back from school the other day and said "Mummy, Daddy, I've been learning new ways of doing writing, and now I do my letters on a slant."
CDT: The question there is, you know, will she be writing "colour" with a "u", or—
DNA: Oh, er, she will be writing "color" without a "u" here.
CDT: Yes, it's a sad loss.
DNA: [laughs] well, yes, it's funny, I was talking to somebody else I met over here, who's English, but has lived a lot here and a lot in France. He says his children are complete chameleons, that in London they speak with a very proper English accent, and when they're in France they speak English with a French accent, oddly enough, and when they're in, when they arrive in California they turn into Los Angeles brats.
CDT: Right. Really, trilingual, or tridialectal.
DNA: Yeah. Yeah.
CDT: So, when can we expect the movie?
DNA: I think the current schedule we're looking at is, assuming we get the screenplay into a shape where Disney, are satisfied with what they've got, er, between the end of this year, and the director's ready to start pre-production probably about February next year. And we're all looking at a summer 2001 release. So that's slipped already. But the thing is it's such an expensive project to make, those tend to go slower because everyone gets a little anxious and wants to have their own say about how its going to go.
CDT: yeah, I mean, how long has the project been going on now?
DNA: Well on and off for— it depends what you define as the project and what you don't, because there was a project to film it way back in 83, that then never happened. After several years passed, I bought the rights back, which was one of the most painful financial things I've ever done. And then there was another project to produce it with a film producer guy called Michael Nesmith, who's a very smart guy.
CDT: Not the Michael Nesmith?
DNA: Yes, yes, many many many years ago he wore a bobbly hat and played in the Monkees.
CDT: Just reading his novel as well, I think.
DNA: Yes, yes, he's a very smart guy. But even so, we didn't manage to get that project off the ground, and then suddenly Disney lept into the — well, actually, it was Roger Bienbaum at Caravan and now Spyglass who lead the charge to get it. You know Roger Bienbaum?
CDT: No, no, I er—
DNA: Well, he's a – one of the major producers— over the years he's produced Rain Man and Gorillas in the Mist and Gross Point Blank and GI Jane and most recently, the Sixth Sense.
CDT: Oh right. It seems somehow Disney is sucking in heroes of independent or alternative culture here, with David Lynch – his Disney movie is about to come out, and now—
DNA: Well, the thing is, Disney is just a huge media empire. It's funny, a number of people have said to me, why on earth are you doing it with Disney? Doesn't that mean it's going to be all sort of fluffy animals and family values and so on, and you have to point out that Disney wasn't just the company that did Bambi, it was also the company that did Pulp Fiction. And this is much bigger than Walt Disney pictures. So yes, they're spreading in all sorts of directions, but that's how big they are.
CDT: So we're not going to see a sort of cutesy CGI animated Marvin?
DNA: No. It may well be CGI, but I don't think it's going to be cutesy.
CDT: Well, that's good news. What about the book? I presume that the book will be a major—
DNA: Well, I think we have the opportunity of doing something really kind of astonishing on the screen with that. There is a little bit of background natter going on, and this is not by any means a firm proposal yet, of maybe also doing a 3-D Imax version of part of it or something, but actually being able to do parts of the book in 3-D hanging above the audience would be absolutely wonderful. It's very interesting, because when I— I'm not trying to make great claims of prescience, it was just sort of the accident of the moment, looking back, when we first tried putting this on TV, back in 1980, 81 or whenever this was, putting all these computer graphics on the screen, and that they went—I mean, the little animation company that had the job of doing that, those graphics, they didn't actually have a computer, so they had to paint all the computer graphics by hand, and—
CDT: But they did look stunning at the time.
DNA: But, what was interesting, that was a very hard sell at the time, trying to get people to understand what I was trying to do, and particularly trying to translate that into something that Hollywood at the time was absolutely impossible. Now it's suddenly becoming the most sort of, the lingua franca of the world—computer displays. So the challenge, really, is, you know, I first came up with the thing 21 years ago, and was coming up with something that was kind of far in the future science fiction. Now that future has kind of almost arrived, it's a question of how you can throw the ball forward again, in terms of how you actually see it, you know, how the thing responds to you, what you actually see on the screen. One of the guys I've been talking to in relation to this is somebody who's a little bit of a hero of mine, a guy called Douglas Trumper, who many years ago was the guy who did all the special effects in 2001, he's kind of remained very much at the forefront of digital graphics technology and communications technology and so on. He has some very interesting insights into those, and I very much hope he'll turn out to be involved in the movie.
CDT: One could almost imagine, with the incredible special effects, a movie in which the book is the main attraction and the story almost takes a back seat.
DNA: Well, I think, to be honest, if I was given completely free rein, that's exactly what would happen. I think, you know, when you're doing a movie and they're going to spend, I'm probably not even allowed to say how much money, but a lot of money, obviously, it's got to work as a story over a hundred, 110, 120 mins, whatever it is. So, there's a lot of pressure on me to tell the story, and there's a lot of pressure from me to realize all this stuff, and we'll come to a happy medium somewhere.
CDT: Hmm. But with the increasingly, I mean audiences are increasingly aware of and used to media saturation, which is sort of what the Guide is—
DNA: You're absolutely right. I mean, it's interesting watching the way in which you know, children will sometimes watch a video just on fast forward, and just absorb it all that way. And they're used to flicking backwards and forwards, watching a bit of this, bit of that. Actually, you know, we tend to, the older generation, we tend to think of this as an attention span deficit. But we all learn to, we all have our different languages. If you read Stephen Pinker's book on the language instinct, he talks about the ways in which, when children pass through the language acquisition stage in the first two years of their life, they aren't really acquiring language, they're almost just inventing it as they go along. They take whatever they find and make new languages out of it. Which is what the difference between a pidgeon language and a creole …. The next generation creates a very grammatically rich language. So I think when we look at the ways in which children interact with information and just think, you know, they're not concentrating properly, they're just absorbing information in a completely different way, and I think it's important to try and understand that and try and stay abreast of it. And understand what the implications are. And I think that therefore, that given any movie has a substantial part of its life in the cinema, it also has a second life in video or DVD now, and I think it's worth thinking about making sure there is a certain intensity that matches that medium.
CDT: Right. Well, let's segue from the Guide on the screen to the Guide in real life. First thing I wanted to ask is, you've talked to a certain extent in the past about the way you visualized the guide originally, as it was at the time that the first pocket calculators came out—
DNA: Right. Yep.
CDT:—and I wondered if there's been this whole evolution in your imagination of the Guide in your imagination from pocket calculator to Palm VII.
DNA: Very much so. Again, when I was thinking of it 20 years ago, I can't pretend I thought about it very deeply. These technologies were a long way in the future, I didn't have any particular grand insight into them, I was just sort of er, creating a storytelling device. It's interesting that I, not in the radio thing, but in the book or maybe it's on the TV, I can't remember, I actually have Ford, once he gets off Earth, sort of reconnecting to the general network out there, which is — I don't know where that came from, but it was about right. I guess what I hadn't foreseen, and let's face it, nobody had foreseen, was that completely open system that anybody could belong to, anybody could add stuff to, anybody could communicate across in any way they liked, would arrive— and the actual machines— the machines you use to access the Internet can be as big or small or purple or yellow as you like. It's completely irrelevant. It isn't a function of the machine, they're simply the buckets you take to the well, you can dip any size, shape of bucket into the well that suits you, your kind of purpose.
CDT: So early on, you had this idea of a network device.
DNA: Yep.
CDT: Right.
DNA: And the thing was, it was a kind of information source where people created collaboratively. So we had all these— I mean, Ford Prefect is just one researcher who's going out there and putting stuff into the guide. And, you know, I imagined, there are millions of researchers out there. I guess I hadn't quite, I hadn't realized, and I don't think anybody had until relatively recently, is that I probably don't actually need, the actual researcher as such — as a separate hired entity — is really a function of book publishing. When you have something like the Web where information that goes into it is instantly accessible to anybody, and anybody else can read it or comment on it or whatever, it means that the distinction between researchers and readers kind of disappears. It means that everybody is really sharing information, sharing knowledge.
CDT: It is also sort of an outdated concept that, I suppose was necessary, the whole idea that the entry on the Earth was cut back to two words.
DNA: Yup. I mean, that's completely outdated. I mean, that was completely wrong. But, you know. I think the surprise is that I got anything right, not that I did anything wrong. [laughs]
CDT: There is all this talk about the sub-ether net, and—
DNA: Yeah, yeah! It's very, well—
CDT:—quite visionary.
DNA: Yeah, well, it's kind of you to say that. I think it was just the luck of the moment.
CDT: So the er, where did the idea that came in pretty early, the origin of the Don't Panic cover. What was that?
DNA: Erm… to be honest, I can't remember. I mean, very often what happens when you're writing, I mean, you're working to a particular general, possibly quite vague idea. Er, but the very specific things that end up on the page tends to be what the sentence demands, if you see what I mean. So you need some nice way of ending this paragraph, or ending the sentence, and the actual words you use kind of come out of that rhythm. And then you think, does that mean anything? Does that sound as if it means anything? And if it sounds as if it means anything, it can stay there. If it doesn't, [laughs] I'll have to think of something that sounds better. You know. I think that just saying that saying it would have Don't Panic on it just seemed like a nice conclusion to that paragraph more than anything else.
CDT: So you're changing your mind all the time, for the sake of—
DNA: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. Just thinking about the way in which you write books, now the text of Hitch-hiker's or any other books are set in stone, unless somebody makes a misprint, and very often I'll look at a bit of it and I'll see some paragraph that makes me wince, and think, oh, God, I wish I could change that, you know, I was really struggling a bit that day and really felt I had to write something, and then other occasions—there was one of the Dirk Gently books that people kept on asking me, you know, "I don't understand the end, what happened at the end," and I'd say "oh, just read it again, it'll all make sense, you just sort of read it again, read it more carefully," and they'd go away and read it again more carefully and come back and say "I still don't understand it," and I'd say "well, it's all there, it all makes sense." And then after a while I had to do a reading to tape of it, and I got to the end and thought, "humm. I don't quite understand what's happened there." [laughs] So I began to see what everyone else meant and what I meant. And if this stuff was out there soft, rather than printed on millions of pieces of paper, you'd all be adjusting that, I think the "leave-it" idea of the text as paramount, I think, will actually just disappear, because people would carry on tinkering with it.
CDT: Right. Well, it must be art if they can't understand it.
DNA: [Laughs]
CDT: I actually noticed there was a warning on the H2G2 site for researchers not to imitate your style—
DNA: Well, it's true that, and this is not me making claims of myself, it tends to be true of any writer who's got a distinctive style, that imitations of it always just sort of ring very false… everybody who starts writing has somebody they'll admire, whose rhythms will infuse their writing, but very quickly, if you're any good, what will happen is that very quickly something will emerge from that. You've got to have something to start with, but—
CDT: Who were your heroes to begin with?
DNA: Well, yeah, I only identified one of them inadvertently a couple of years ago, and I hadn't—which was, I mentioned, I had a daughter, she's five, and I was only reading the Winnie the Pooh books and I suddenly thought, Woha!
CDT: [laughs]
DNA: The language rhythms there had obviously gone very deep into me, because I recognize a lot of that…
CDT: Right.
DNA: And it was my mother who said, well, of course, you know, Marvin is, is Eeyore.
CDT: Yes.
DNA: And she'd said that to me before, and I'd said no, no, no, nonsense. And then when I was reading Winnie the Pooh to Polly, I thought, well, "oooh, I see what she means!" [laughs]
CDT: Yes. And all that business of capitalizing certain phrases, you know, "Very Important Thing."
DNA: Hmm. Yeah, yeah. Yes, so that, I think that was of a period, because you come across that as well in 1066, you know, 1066—
CDT: —And All That.
DNA: Yeah, but otherwise, I mean, the— so, A.A. Milne was I think, a kind of a secret influence on me, because I really wasn't aware of it happening, but I can't deny it was there. But there were other more obvious ones. I mean, certainly, one that was very large in my mind was Python, which was, you know, what I grew up with. Another terribly obvious one was Kurt Vonnegut.
CDT: Right.
DNA: Something I came to rather late in life, actually, but once I started reading him completely sort of swamped me, was PG Wodehouse. But I can almost tell to the paragraph, looking back in my books, where I started reading Wodehouse. Erm, and of course it's interesting that Milne was such an early influence, because of course Wodehouse and Milne couldn't stand each other. Oh, another influence I guess would be —when I cite these as influences, I don't remotely presume to any comparison, only, you know, the things that have had influence on me. So, when I mention names like Dickens and Austen, nevertheless, they were a very important part of, when I was growing up, understanding how you can make words funny, actually. Oh, and the other great one is Evelyn Waugh.
CDT: Right. Of course. Yes. Okay, well let me go through a quick list of questions passed on by colleagues here. First one, "new technology has been good to you and your franchise. Discuss."
DNA: [laughs] "me and my franchise?" [laughs]
CDT: I presume, the Hitch-Hiker's franchise.
DNA: Erm, well, I don't even know where to take that question, actually.
CDT: [laughs]
DNA: It doesn't seem to be asking anything sufficiently specific to, erm—
CDT: Well, if technology had stood still since 1977, you know, you wouldn't be where you are now.
DNA: Er, well, you mean I wouldn't be in California? [laughs]
CDT: [laughs] No, well, certain things that you've done, the game, the, you know.
DNA: I suppose the answer to that would be if all this new technology hadn't arisen, I probably would have spent more time writing, which would have been good for me. [laughs]
CDT: Weren't you a great procrastinator, in the beginning?
DNA: Oh, yeah, always have been, I'm afraid.
CDT: Do you still procrastinate?
DNA: Oh, yeah, yeah.
CDT: What's the chosen method of procrastination?
DNA: Er, technology. [laughs] Surfing the web, doing e-mail. Oh, I must just sort of—I must look at this site very quickly before I get down to work. You know. Or kind of, see if I've got any replies, oh I have had a reply, oh I'd better answer that just before I get down to work, you know, all that kind of stuff.
CDT: I was wondering if you were a big gaming fan.
DNA: Oddly enough, no. I mean, there was a point when I was, but only a very, very brief point, and that was all the way back in the days of text only games, which I thought were great. And I did one, along with a company called Infocom, who were sort of the top dogs at doing text-only games. But I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed that. And then, of course, a couple of years ago, with the Digital Village, we did this game Starship Titanic. Which I thought was terrific, but it was very interesting for me having done one fifteen years earlier, discovering how much more unwieldy a kind of project it is making one of those things now. Because when we did the Hitch-Hiker's Guide as a text-only game, it was me and one other guy—an experienced game writer…
CDT: Hmm.
DNA: And he and I went for six months, and then suddenly there it was, and it was something you could play for 40 hours. And now Starship Titanic took a couple of dozen to thirty people two years. And er, I was just one of those guys. So it's become a different kind of medium. To be honest, I don't know if the medium's changed or if I've changed or I've just got older, but I'm not particularly interested in computer games these days.
CDT: You have always been a big Mac fan.
DNA: Ah, yes.
CDT: What do you think of the new iMacs?
DNA: Well, I think, I couldn't be more happy at what Steve Jobs has done coming back to Apple and reinvigorating it, with all these new ideas and new technologies, and also just making, it's funny, his other move, apart from technological innovations is to make everything more stylish, and he gets a lot of flack for that, but at the same time everyone's trying to copy it. But I think that concept of design actually infuses the whole thing … it is an integrated system of hardware and software, and the real hard creativity that goes into designing those objects … [tape ends]
CDT: What computer are you using right now?
DNA: I'm sitting in front of a Macintosh Powerbook G3, bronze keyboard version. Actually, I'm just seeing what the apple stock price is, because I've finally, finally after all these years followed my own advice and bought some Apple stock the other day, so — Done very nicely, thank you very much. [laughs]
CDT: Are you on two phone lines? Or do you have DSL, cable?
DNA: No, no. ADSL I think I'm finally getting next week.
CDT: Right. Erm, next question from a colleague: Don't we already have a Hitch-Hiker's hand-held guide to the galaxy in the shape of the Palm VII?
DNA: Erm, well, yes and no. And I think the Palms are very nice devices, but I just think we have a very long way to go yet. I think that it's going to be — we're going to end up with— I try to avoid "end up," because it suggests there's some end point in view, but in fact things just continually change and change and change way, way into the future. I think we're at the point where all sorts of things are converging and that, when you have those sort of convergences there's an opportunity for an awful lot of creative thinking about how exactly things should just fit together, and something a little bit like the Palm VII but with, first of all, much much faster, permanently on connection to all the information out there, and I almost don't want to use the word "Web," because the Web is one model and I think it'll be supplanted by one better as we move — and the thing is, the Web is almost based on — it has too much of its roots in desktop publishing, which of course has its own roots in paper. So the model we see on the Web is still much, much too much based on paper, and not yet on the free-flow and interconnection and live interconnection of information. I think the other thing that needs to come into this technology as soon as it possibly can is GPS, so that these devices know where we are in cyberspace and know where we are in the real world. The moderating of this connection is I think going to be a source of great power.
[Starship Titanic … those are still two things hard to reconcile… if you pre-render something it can look absolutely fabulous and gorgeous… there would be two different ways of moving through the ship, the matter side and the data side, and you could move seamlessly from one to the other… if you look at the real world, then the matter side is the real world and what Gibson called cyberspace… these devices form the thing that can navigate through both, share things continuously with each other and live]. It's not a guide as you traditionally think of Guides, like the good food guide or the restaurant guide or the rough guides… there's a certain quality to those that comes from the fact that it's on paper and there's a limited amount of information. Somebody else is filtering it, editing it. It's not their fault, it's just the nature of that medium, and we're now in a completely different medium, and what happens when you move from one medium to another is you accidently take the old constraints with you until you learn to do without them, just as the first films included the proscenium arch. So I think as we look as how guides work on the screen, we've got to go looking through the proscenium arches, and how we can get rid of them. I think what we'll end up with, and I hope H2G2 is sort of in the foremost of creating, is something where essentially people are continuously sharing information in real time, and the underlying—the software underneath it is the thing that provides structure to that in real time.
CDT: So what we're envisioning at the end of the day is much like H2G2, completely down to earth, non-fiction product…
DNA: Oh, yes, it's non-fiction, yes. It's trying to realize the real thing in real life rather than trying to create something that's going to be a vehicle for fiction. Which is not to say people can't put fiction in there, provided we know, we have a very clear way of telling the difference. [laughs]
CDT: So we're not going to have a guide that tells you where the nearest restaurant is and also how to avoid the Ravenous Bugblatter beast of Traal?
DNA: Exactly. Though if you think about it, we go back to my model of the matter side and the data side, stories and fiction always exist in our software space, in the data side, and there's no reason why that can't be there as well. Provided you're very clear which it is you're seeing. I mean, you might be, you know, at Stonehenge, and want information about that, then, I suppose you know a lot of fictional stuff has happened around Stonehenge, like Far from the Madding Crowd, and there's no reason not to use that physical point of departure as a key into all those fictional things as well. But you're not going to, I hope, mistake the one for the other, despite what journalists may try. [laughs]
CDT: Well it is sort of setting itself up for those expectations, I suppose, with calling it a hand-held hitch-hiker's guide, it's going to …
DNA: Well, if it confuses people a little bit, I don't mind. [laughs]
CDT: Well, it's got to be good for sales, right?
DNA: yeah, yeah.
CDT: How involved are you in the day-to-day workings—
DNA: Just at this very moment, not so much, because I'm on the end of a modem. Once I'm on a faster link, I will be more so again. There's something about using a modem after years of ISDN and ethernet and so on, it's a bit of a shock. [laughs] My involvement with H2G2 as such is first of all historical, having created the thing it's based on, and then it's brainstorming with the guys who are running it, saying how should we be doing this, what are the ideas here, where should we be heading. Erm, and generally shaking things up. And then also, and this is something I'll be doing more once it's easier, doing my own content, just to drive additions to it.
CDT: Digital village is still private, right?
DNA: Yes.
CDT: Do you see a massive sort of IPO cash-in in its future?
DNA: I wouldn't say no. [laughs]
CDT: It certainly seems to have helped a lot of other companies, who fund further projects by raising a quick couple of billion on Wall Street.
DNA: Yeah, well, you know I always think a quick couple of billion comes in handy. [laughs]
CDT: With that sort of money, you could buy Disney.
DNA: It is funny to see the eruptions of wealth, like airbags going off. There are one or two people I know slightly or have met who just sort of suddenly become mega-billionaires. These are just guys who are the same age or younger than me, walking around completely bewildered. [laughs]
CDT: Do you feel jealous of these Young Turks, who are just coming in and launching net companies?
DNA: well, I don't know. If I said " no, no, no, of course not," would you believe me? [laughs]
CDT: Probably not. [laughs]
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Storms in DC
I'm in a penthouse suite at the Watergate, and the most gigantic thunderstorm I've ever witnessed is rolling around the skies above the Potomac. I was in Union Station when it first exploded, cracking thunderbolts above the White House, and it felt like some kind of divine revenge for the nonsense that has gone on in this town daily for the last four-and-a-bit years. It's funny how quickly a bit of electrical showmanship in the skies reduces our brains to superstitious mush.
I should have guessed it would happen. It was the most horribly humid day I've ever experienced on the east coast. I picked up my award from the PRSA for excellence in technology journalism -- did I mention that? I've been boring my friends with it for days by dropping it into conversation. It was for the cover story on SpaceShipOne. Anyway, I gave a little speech about how technology journalists need to set their sights higher and give us greater visions of the future instead of obsessing about, say, the latest version of the iPod shuffle. Then I stepped outside the hotel and my clothes were instantly covered in sweat. Amazing how that happens. My little tour of DC was predicated entirely on which buildings had the best air conditioning. Luckily, my favorite -- the Air and Space Museum -- did very well on that score. Goodness, but I like touching moon rocks and the Apollo 11 capsule and walking through Skylab.
And so here I am, back at my room in the Watergate. Strange that I should go from Deep Throat's doorstep to here within a few days. The Watergate scandal must think I'm stalking it, but it's complete coincidence, honest. I'm just here to pick up some letterhead.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, June 04, 2005
Deep Throat and the God-man
By Thursday afternoon, the media circus outside Deep Throat's house -- a $300,000 two-storey wood-front home in leafy suburban Santa Rosa, modest by Bay Area standards -- had dwindled to a single Pacsat satellite truck, three or four reporters (including me) and a photographer. It had been more than a day since Mark Felt's second and last appearance, in which he told us bluntly "I'll arrange to write a book or something and collect all the money I can". A photographer snapped one last picture of the Felt's mailbox, a jaunty-looking thing with the head and wings of a duck, then left. Minutes later, so did the satellite truck. With the Felts a no-show, and the neighbors having little to recollect about the quiet old man down the street, whom they barely knew, this stakeout was a dog that wouldn't hunt.
Perhaps the only interesting twist to the saga of the family was Joan Felt's involvement in the unusual spiritual movement known as Adidam (and even that kind of thing is par for the course in Santa Rosa). Adidam, founded in 1970, is hard to explain -- it has undergone as many changes of doctrine as name (it has at various times been known as Dawn Horse Communion, Free Communion Church, Free Primitive Church of Divine Communion, Crazy Wisdom Fellowship, Johannine Daist Communion, Advaitayana Buddhist Communion, and Free Daist Communion). Its leader, currently known as Adi Da (but originally known as Franklin Jones), the son of a window salesman from Long Island, proclaims himself a "God-man" who has arrived on Earth to "perfectly fulfill the ancient longings of the human heart."
Adidam has somewhere between one and three thousand adherents worldwide. Not only is Joan Felt one, she was listed as the Adidam coordinator for Santa Rosa until Wednesday, some time between 6 and 9pm, when her name and number were hurriedly removed. She is still listed as one of the sponsors of a book on Adidam known as The Mummery Book.
Denizens of the Adidam website went wild over the fact that one of their own, whom many apparently recognized by name or face, had become so suddenly famous -- and over the potential financial reward their religion might reap. "They [Adidam's administrators] are fearing attention of the press, I assume," wrote one newsgroup correspondent identified only as "E". "At the same time, they are cooking on the thought of some of this 'white hot' Watergate bread being channeled their way." Some wondered out loud if Joan Felt was planted in their midst by the FBI. Others commented with surprising frankness on how much of a space cadet Joan Felt seemed at the press conference. "she had on this idiotic grin during the TV footage," said "C." "At first I attributed that to pride at the news of the uncovering of this secret. But now that there's an Adidam connection, I attribute the grin to the shakti-bliss of the divine master!"
Horse Box
I know I promised not to talk about E3 any more, but did I tell you about the horse's head incident? Well, before the show, I spent some time hanging out eating Italian food with the Electronic Arts team working on Godfather: The Game. Tim McDowd, the team's PR guy, asked me where I was staying in LA for the show. "Why?" I asked, "are you going to put a horse's head in my bed?" No, he laughed, we were just thinking of getting some journalists together for a drink during E3. I gave him the name of the hotel and thought no more of it.
Then on the Wednesday of the show, tired and with ears buzzing, I returned to my room -- and noticed an empty cardboard box on the floor. Indignant, I called housekeeping -- did the maid leave it here? Can you clear it away, please? This is not what I expect from a hotel of this caliber. On further investigation, the box appeared to be addressed to the concierge, from Electronic Arts. What was going on? I jumped on the bed, still shrouded in darkness, and grabbed the nearest cushion. Hmm. Strange shape.
Of course, it was a giant, fluffy, stuffed horse's head with "x"s for eyes and a note "from the Don" tied to its tongue. I had to laugh that, like a six year old at Christmas, I'd focused entirely on the cardboard box and almost didn't notice the present.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, June 02, 2005
Return of the Killer Comments
Yes, the comments link is back, and this time it's hosted by Blogger -- so we shouldn't have any problem with it disappearing again. Post, fire, flame away.
A Trip From The Moon
This just in: antique space probe crash-lands in Nantes. American authorities to investigate whether lunar inhabitants have weapons of mass destruction. Cheese-eating surrender monkeys do nothing, claim it was merely homage to original sci-fi flick. Film at 11.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Last of the President's Men
After that last Blah, I went and introduced my roommate to All The President's Men on DVD. It seemed strange and somehow toothless, as if we were watching a movie featuring the Loch Ness Monster after it had been conclusively proved Nessie was a mere water snake. The mystery has been with us for so long, it feels wrong to be looking at it from this new perspective, judging the Deep Throat character for historical accuracy.
And the hindsight. Goodness, the hindsight! Deep Throat keeps talking about how he knows the FBI is on the reporters' trail. Bradlee tells an anecdote about Hoover becoming head of the FBI for life, then asks about Deep Throat's reliability in the same breath (which must have seemed like a non-sequitur at the time, but now makes all the sense in the world -- the only question about Deep Throat's reliability would have been the fact that he was passed over in the race to replace Hoover). It's like reading an Agatha Christie for the second time and noticing the butler cleaning a knife in the first chapter. Of course! The answer was hidden in plain sight.
Even the "who is Deep Throat?" section of this DVD's special features, which must be at least six years old, list Felt's name first in its suspects. A list which, it must be said, runs from the most bland and innocuous all the way up to the most exciting. The equivalent of the butler did it.
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